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Posts Tagged ‘Cavium’

When I first met Adnan Hamid, Breker’s CEO, his philosophical understanding of verification and its implications for electronics was as crystal clear then as it is now. He sees it as the enabler for greater innovation in chips and beyond, and takes it as his life’s mission. His passion was inspiring to me and I did not hesitate for a second when we decided to jointly start Breker. Throughout our journey, I have watched the market converge with what we are building at Breker, and have come to better appreciate my partner, the visionary man. (more…)

Ever since Accellera started the Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG), this emerging technology has generated a lot of buzz both within the EDA industry and among our semiconductor and systems customers. As the pioneer in this technology we get a lot of questions about what portable stimulus is, why it is different from the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and other established approaches, and why anyone would need it.

We’ve devoted quite a few posts to this topic in The Brekker Treker blog, stretching back two years to when Accellera first set up a proposed working group (PWG) to survey the industry and decided whether standardization of portable stimulus was feasible and desirable. Given the many posts scattered throughout the past two years, we thought that we would take this opportunity to give readers new to this topic a guided tour of the information that we have available.

We’ve just returned from our most important trade show of the year: the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose. Sure, DAC is a bigger show, but it covers all of EDA and so lacks the front-end digital focus of DVCon. We previewed the event over our last few blogposts and today we’d like to summarize what happened and make a prediction or two about how this particular DVCon will affect the industry.

The biggest news for us was that portable stimulus seemed to be on everyone’s lips this year. Many of the engineers who stopped by to visit our booth had heard the term and were aware that the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) is developing a standard. If they didn’t know what portable stimulus was, they almost surely knew by the end of the show.

We hope that the title of this blog post piqued your interest, because we don’t believe that we’ve seen anyone anywhere claiming to do automated multi-SoC verification at this level. Two weeks ago, we previewed next week’s Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose. We highlighted one particular talk being co-presented by Breker and Cavium on “Using Portable Stimulus to Verify Cache Coherency in a Many-Core SoC” in the 9:00-10:30 a.m. session on Tuesday, March 1.

We teased you with the statement that this talk will describe “generating test cases for a multi-SoC configuration with well over 100 cores” and it’s time to tell you a bit more now that we have issued a press release on our project with Cavium. Of course, we need to reserve some of the details for the paper in the DVCon proceedings and the talk itself so that new material is being presented at the conference. We heartily encourage you at attend the show and hear for yourself.

In last week’s post, we provided a preview of the program at the annual Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose, coming up in ten days. We mentioned some of the interesting talks and other activities there, and focused in particular on “Using Portable Stimulus to Verify Cache Coherency in a Many-Core SoC” on Tuesday morning. The paper for this session was co-authored by Breker and Cavium, and both companies will present together at DVCon.

The paper and presentation describe the use of our Cache Coherency TrekApp and TrekSoC-Si to automatically generate self-checking, portable test cases for more than 100 CPU cores in a multi-SoC configuration in the Cavium bring-up lab. To set the stage for this story, today we’d like to revisit some of the reasons why cache coherency is so hard to verify and why an automated approach is the best solution.

Regular readers of The Breker Trekker know that we like to preview, review, and dissect technical conferences and trade shows that are of interest to verification engineers. Perhaps the conference we’ve covered the most has been the annual Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose. As far as we know, this is the biggest event anywhere focused on digital and system design and verification, a nice complement to the analog-ishDesignCon.

As a matter of fact, DVCon has become so successful that there are now regional conferences in India and Europe in addition to the U.S. show. We’ve strongly supported DVCon India, including serving for all three years on the Promotions Committee, and have participated in DVCon Europe as well. But those are a bit in the future; DVCon (U.S.) 2016 is coming up in a just a few weeks. The program is online now, so we thought we’d review it and suggest some sessions of possible interest.